Weird Pauses

[WhiteFalcon]

I wonder what is causing the irregular pauses on the GP2X. Other people mentioned this problem here but no one seems to know the cause. It is quite annoying when listening to music, for instance in OldPlay. At first, I thought it had to do with loading from the SD, hence the SD speed (mine is the slowest 5/2MBit 1GB Kingston), but it happens even when there is no SD access, afaik (when a SID song is loaded and being played, in the menu of DrMDx etc.). The pause lasts for about one second.

Has anyone found any regularity in it? Some people seem not to have ever experienced this pauses so I am afraid of the cause being in the hardware :huh:

Could somebody prove me wrong?

 

[DARKGATE]

=\ HUMMM i have same problem.

 

[FluffyPanda]

I doubt it's a hardware fault.

I think it's most likely a problem with the OS, but until we have the source...

*ducks*

 

[WhiteFalcon]

I doubt it's a hardware fault.

I think it's most likely a problem with the OS, but until we have the source...

*ducks*

​

Glad to hear so

I was unsure because a friend told me he had no such problem with his unit.

 

[Squidge]

People have noticed that with faster SD cards, the pause is shorter, and it is also shorter when the card is mounted as sync and noatime, so it seems to be related to the sd card to me.

How it's configured at the moment, every file you access has it's access time updated, but not at the that particular moment - it happens some time in the future.

Some other SD cards don't seem to suffer from the pause at all.

 

[nickspoon]

I have a theory that it's to do with the new Toshiba SD drivers in 1.2.1, does it happen in any other firmware version?

 

[Drak]

I have a theory that it's to do with the new Toshiba SD drivers in 1.2.1, does it happen in any other firmware version?

​

happened to me in 1.0.0 :angry: still does.

 

[nickspoon]

What type of SD are you using?

 

[Drak]

What type of SD are you using?

​

PNY 256mb [5x?]
Centrios 256mb [66x]

 

[sam fisher]

Never had it with my sandisk. just hate batteries sometimes!

 

[nickspoon]

I reckon that the firmware has problems with cards using Toshiba SD technology. This affects quite a number of brands, even though it isn't obvious they use this technology. Viking and Kingston are examples of this (my Viking card is obviously using Toshiba technology, as it's just a Toshiba card with a Viking sticker on it). Sandisk is not affected because it doesn't use this technology.

Well, that's what I'm guessing the pattern is, correct me if I'm wrong.

 

[GiG]

I have this problem with OldPlay 0.9 only: half a second of paused once a while (about 30"), regularly. This happens playing .spc files, that should be completely stored in memory (64k), so I think it is a bug in OldPlay, nothing more.

 

[NeoStuey]

I have this problem with OldPlay 0.9 only: half a second of paused once a while (about 30"), regularly. This happens playing .spc files, that should be completely stored in memory (64k), so I think it is a bug in OldPlay, nothing more.

​

Taken from the oldplay 0.95 topic.

Just noticed that the HOLD function is a bit iffy, will fix that. I will also add an option so that HOLD automatically turns off screen (not the other way around cause often you want keys but dont need screen).

For v1.0 I want to add a few missing features (like Songseeking, saving/loading playlist and adding whole dirs to playlist) but mostly I want to fix the small things, so if you find any small quirks let me know.

(Like:
- Equalizer out of sync
- Equalizer biased toward lower frequencies
- Clicks when switching song
- Sometimes maxsongs is repored as 0
- SPC songs skip 31 seconds in (now WTF is that?!)
- PLAYING can show when not playing anything.
- Volume settings seems too high (high mp3s sounds cutoff)
)

​

The rest of the topic is here.

 

[NeoStuey]

I reckon that the firmware has problems with cards using Toshiba SD technology. This affects quite a number of brands, even though it isn't obvious they use this technology. Viking and Kingston are examples of this (my Viking card is obviously using Toshiba technology, as it's just a Toshiba card with a Viking sticker on it). Sandisk is not affected because it doesn't use this technology.

Well, that's what I'm guessing the pattern is, correct me if I'm wrong.

​

Integral = Toshiba OEM

 

[taras]

Yep I've had the pause in OldPlay, but it was never as long as a second (and I have a Kingston ElitePro).

 

[WhiteFalcon]

I have this problem with OldPlay 0.9 only: half a second of paused once a while (about 30"), regularly. This happens playing .spc files, that should be completely stored in memory (64k), so I think it is a bug in OldPlay, nothing more.

​

Yeah, in OldPlay it usually happens about 30s after loading a song - even a small one, like you say. Yet is also happens in all the other apps I use, for instance I usually get killed in MethaneBros when the pause occurs <_<

I am using FW 1.2.0 and I guess 1.2.1 does not solve that.

 

[GiG]

I have fw 1.1.0. Just given Methane Bros a try, and I haven't noticed any problem.

 

[Drag]

I've also noticed this problem. It occurs in Duke 3D, and in my own test game, but I haven't tested enough other games to see anything else. Now, both Duke 3D and my game will read a file on the SD card after the program has loaded (in my game, it reads the level file), so I'm thinking maybe it could in fact be the access time being updated for the file.

Also, does SDL on the GP2X create stderr.txt and stdout.txt when it runs?

 

[FluffyPanda]

I think it's pretty clearly an SD writing pause. I was playing spout last night and I noticed that it paused for a fraction of a second twice, both times I'd just beaten my high score about 20 seconds earlier.

I'm guessing that spout doesn't call sync() after writing to the card and the pause happens when linux decides to push its cache to the card.

 

[dgnadt]

I have a Transcend 80x and never have the pause.